Greetings and welcome to yet another yearly celebration of this site’s full founding just three years ago!
These yearly moments allow us to have a look at where where the site has been going over the last year and ideally have some sense of where it’s headed–as much as that’s possible in this day and age.
If you haven’t noticed it, we’ve placed a much more detailed summation of statistics on the main page. This currently includes a database of over 5,700 wines reviewed and scored as well as nearly 1,300 article on the website with over 100 of those classified as “Longread Features“. These are articles that take in depth looks at certain regions and topics and are at least 1,500 words in length although usually run much, much longer.
In terms of subscribing, we’ve now introduced a Two-Year Subscription option at a discounted price over the annual subscription. If you’d like to make use of this, but already have a One-Year, you can sign up for the Two-Year, let us know, and we’ll add your remaining One-Year length on to the Two-Year. We hope this allows people a great additional option to support the site.
While we took a short publishing break at the end of August, we were very busy behind the scenes with a thorough overhaul to the look and interaction of the site. If viewing this on a mobile, it will look much the same, but for the desktop, it’s set up quite differently. The main idea here was to make the mobile, desktop, and tablet versions all much more coherent with one another. It’s also allowed us to arrange the information a bit better and give more focus to our extensive Reference section and all the information contained within.
Do note that the new interactivity for the site makes use of technology that’s slightly newer and if you’re using a browser that’s more than 8-10 years old, you might encounter problems. While we’ve been testing it for several weeks, issues can always pop up, so please let us know if you encounter anything that might seem like a bug.
Also new is the Food Through Wine section that’s restaurant reviews with a heavy wine focus to them. Then there are the Essays which run independent of the Longread Features and are current, topical opinion pieces on important matters or then just things to have a good laugh about. We have a good number of guest authors writing these so it offers up a more diverse set of opinions and we are open to submissions.
And lastly, there’s Drinking Well which had been launched just before the pandemic hit… oops. We’ve now brought these back as they’re in depth travel guides to specific and usually offbeat regions all with the guiding premise that perhaps you’d like to enjoy a drink while on a trip.
And we thank everyone who has been participating in what started out as something of an experiment back in 2019 to see if this could work. Amazingly, it has and subscriber numbers continue to grow despite the fact we do no advertising. As you’ll note, others have followed as this is one of the only ways remaining to ensure independent articles with a unique voice, supported solely by you the reader.
Great to have you along and we’re looking forward to continue on this grand adventure!
